When people ask me what Palm Beach is like, I tell them it’s a place where people tie cashmere sweaters around their necks with a complete absence of irony; where, a few feet off Worth Avenue, you can pay your respects to the marked grave of Johnnie Brown—the pet monkey that belonged to architect and planner Addison Mizner. In short, Palm Beach is Brigadoon, a genteel fantasy revolving around the permanence of money both old and new. In 2019 Worth Avenue looks almost exactly as it did in 1945. The only difference is that, instead of seeing the Duke and Duchess of Windsor promenading, you can spot Rod Stewart or Jon Bon Jovi.
Les Standiford’s book is a once-over-brightly jog through the history of Palm Beach. “Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago and the Rise of America’s Xanadu” has only two flaws. First, Mr. Standiford never introduces the reader to Johnnie Brown. Second, for most of the first 100 pages he rehashes material from “Last Train to Paradise” (2002), his definitive life of Henry Flagler, one of two men who made modern Florida possible. Flagler, John D. Rockefeller’s partner in Standard Oil, built a lineup of luxury hotels, then built a railroad through the state as far as Key West, so his friends could access those hotels. (The other crucial entrepreneur was Willis Carrier, who invented air conditioning.)
Once the enfeebled Flagler meets his maker by falling down marble steps at his Palm Beach mansion, the book takes off. Its richest portion centers on Marjorie Merriweather Post, the cereal heiress and magnate who began planning Mar-a-Lago in 1924 while married to financier E.F. Hutton. By January 1927, Post had spent as much as $8 million (or nearly $120 million today).
As Palm Beach mansions go, Mar-a-Lago is a weird one-off. Part of it is a conventional Palm Beach mansion, part of it is a constantly shape-shifting, irresistibly gaudy series of stage sets. The complex sits on 17 acres spanning the 18-mile-long barrier island of Palm Beach. Mar-a-Lago has 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms (with gold fixtures), a nine-hole golf course and three bomb shelters. The exterior is mostly Mediterranean, but the interiors range from Spanish to Colonial with stops everywhere in between. If you don’t like the room you’re in, walk through a door and try again. All this is because the estate was mostly designed by Joseph Urban ( Marion Sims Wyeth also had a hand in it). Urban was the Viennese genius who designed the Ziegfeld Follies (not to mention buildings for Emperor Franz Josef). It was Urban who erected a 75-foot bell tower, a crucial feature meant to unite the disparate elements of the design.
Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago and the Rise of America’s Xanadu
By Les Standiford
Atlantic Monthly, 319 pages, $27
Film director Preston Sturges, who was briefly married to one of Post’s daughters, had his issues with Palm Beach generally and with Mar-a-Lago specifically. When E.F. Hutton asked Sturges if he would be able to support Eleanor Post Hutton in the style to which she was accustomed, Sturges replied, “I would hope in better taste.” Sturges took his revenge years later when he wrote and directed “The Palm Beach Story,” a joyous romp that featured Rudy Vallee as a stiffly obtuse scion of wealth. The film’s “Ale and Quail Club,” a crew of rowdy gun-happy drunks, bore a startling resemblance to Palm Beach’s revered Bath and Tennis Club.
One of the Post daughters who didn’t marry Preston Sturges became the actress Dina Merrill. When I knew her, Merrill lived in a residence featuring large paintings of her father and mother. But it was clear from conversation that her father shone much brighter in her memory than her mother. Her feelings about her mother were ambivalent, mostly because Marjorie Merriweather Post felt her daughter’s acting ambitions were ridiculous. Why go to New York and study when you could go to glamorous parties all winter long?
By the 1960s, the huge Palm Beach mansions built in the 1920s were insupportable white elephants. Marjorie Merriweather Post tried to bequeath Mar-a-Lago to the state of Florida as an international gathering place for seminars, but Palm Beach thought that was a terrible idea—the traffic! The hoi polloi! Ultimately the state decided it was too expensive: At the time, the yearly overhead for the 75 staffers amounted to slightly more than $250,000.
At that point, Post tried the federal government. Perhaps Mar-a-Lago could be a winter White House? She invited Lady Bird Johnson down for a visit, and pitched the estate as a “more luxurious” Camp David. Post eventually agreed to a $3 million endowment to provide funds for upkeep, and a move was begun to allow the National Park Service to take over the property after Post died, in 1973, at the age of 86. But the head of the Park Service realized that the endowment’s interest wouldn’t cover anything approaching the operating costs. In December 1980, the empty house was given back to the Post Foundation and went up for sale in April 1981.
Donald Trump saved the estate from the wrecking ball, or, worse, being converted into condominiums, when he bought Mar-a-Lago in 1985. The price was reported to be between $10 and $15 million. It was a steal. The general impression was that Trump had paid cash, but he actually financed the deal with an unrecorded mortgage from Chase Manhattan Bank for $8.5 million. After factoring in a second mortgage from the Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Co., Trump’s out-of-pocket cost was in the vicinity of $2,800, or, as Mr. Standiford writes, “the cost of the paperwork involved.” Today, improbably, all of Marjorie Merriweather Post’s dreams for her mansion have been realized: Mar-a-Lago functions as a private club as well as the winter White House.
And Donald Trump is undoubtedly delighted by the estate’s current estimated valuation: $160 million.
Mr. Eyman’s biography of Cary Grant will be published next year. He lives in West Palm Beach.
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